Thursday, February 27, 2014

If the last century belonged to the
philosophers of difference, then this must be handed over to the purveyors of
philosophical indifference of whom one name stands out: Giorgio Agamben. What is philosophical indifference? The standard dictionary definition of the
term meaning not caring either way, finds voice in the first age of
philosophical indifference stretching from Stoicism to Kant’s attack on
philosophical indifferentism in the opening pages of the first critique. It is the inability to make a single, true
for all time philosophical decision in favour of one position or action over
the other. Indifferentism occurs especially
when, as is always the case according to Agamben, the two positions you could
care less about either way occupy that of on the one hand a unified, founding,
common, one and on the other a multiple, actualising, proper, many. So, in a sense, since the Greeks, philosophy
has been a dispute over the prevalence of indifference: we cannot choose
between a philosophy of the one and that of the many. And modern thought is founded on Kant’s
development of a critical philosophy to solve the indifference between
philosophies of the one (idealism) and those of the many (empiricism). The second philosophical meaning of indifference, first developed by Hegel, is
pure difference as such or abstract
difference irrespective of any qualities held by the two identities being
differentiated. This is best represented
by the formal notation A≠B. What A and B are in actuality, what qualities
they hold, is indifferent, it does not matter.
In indifferent difference all that matters is that there is difference,
A≠B, as the basis
of the fact that there is identity A=A because A≠B. This is
the founding formula of Hegelian dialectics and all the philosophies of
difference to come because it develops a pre-identity form of difference:
abstract difference irrespective of qualities.

1.Agamben’s Indifference

It can be argued that modern
philosophy is born out of Kantian attacks on indifferentism and the Hegelian
development of pure difference as such.
That said, Agambenian indifference can be termed a third order of
philosophical indifference. His
philosophical system is the making apparent and then rendering indifferent all structures of
differential opposition that lie at the root, he believes, of every major
Western concept-signature or discursive structure. In this manner his philosophy can be termed a
form of metaphysical critique that argues all abstract concepts are only
quasi-transcendental, in that they are historically contingent not logically
necessary. As such Agamben willingly participates in a tradition that includes
Nietzsche, Heidegger, Deleuze and Derrida, thinkers he regularly engages with.
Where he differs from all of these is that he is not a philosopher of
difference in any way we take this term to signify within the tradition to
which I have just alluded. Arguably all his predecessors undermine
philosophical structures of consistent identity through the valorisation of
difference in some form. The central tenet of these thinkers since Nietzsche
is: difference precedes identity and so by definition is permanently undermining
of identity, as identity is always defined as foundational.

Agamben cannot
sign up to this tenet. As a thinker he is
painfully aware that difference is always part of an identity-difference
coupling, so that whilst he agrees with his great forbears that identity
depends on difference, he transcends or transgresses the law of our current age when he insists that difference is as
much implicated in the system of metaphysics as that of identity. If, he
argues, identity structures are historically contingent, not logically
necessary, then so too are differentiating structures, which can then further
be said to be complicit in metaphysics, not a means of overcoming it. Rather
than undermining identity with difference, therefore, Agamben reveals that
identity and difference themselves are not necessary terms but historical
contingencies, that in fact they form one single entity within our tradition,
what we can call identity-difference, and based on these observations one can
suspend their history of opposition by rendering them indifferent to each
other. By which we take to mean suspending
their presentation as forming a single unit of contesting, oppositional
difference: one and many, sovereignty and governance, zoe and bios and so on,
without reconstituting them therefore as a single one.

For Agamben self-identical
full presence, what he calls the common, is a discursive entity not an actual
state. For that matter difference, what he calls the proper, is the same.
Further, concepts are no longer to be taken as identity-concepts, ideational
structures possessive of communal consistency around an agreed set of referents
that can be held under the same conceptual heading, but
identity-difference-concepts that have a historical moment of arising when they
can be seen to become active, a mode of distributing this activity to control
large and stable discursive formations over time, such as language, such as
power, such as life, and an almost fated period of indifference where the clear
differentiations of the system either break down, or can aggressively be shown
to be assailable contingencies. The method of tracing these moments for the
purpose of suspending identity-difference constructs, what he calls signatures,
is an overall methodology that Agamben names philosophical archaeology.

2. Philosophical Archaeology

The much-contested Agamben method
consists of tracing the origins of large scale concepts (signatures) back to
the moment when they first became operative as modes of organising and
legitimising discourse in a manner that owes a huge amount to Foucault’s
conception of discursive intelligibility.
By intelligibility, or what Agamben also calls communicability, it is not
what is said that is meaningful, but
that such and such is allowed to be said by the sanctions of power and our complicity
with these sanctions. That said, these moments of arising, as Agamben calls
them, are not origins founded on historical data in the usual sense but,
inspired by Benjaminian now-time, they actually say as much about us as
contemporaries as they do about historical origins. Thus every contemporary moment
is founded on an origin or arche, yet
every arche is constructed by our
contemporary discourse as the found origin. The past, Agamben argues, only
lives in the present yet the present is constantly a construct of the past. In
this way time is marked by an essential double anachronism, of past things
projected forward into the present and the present as a construct of the past.

Revealing this
historical paradox at the basis of large scale concepts such as power, being,
secularization, language and so on, is Agamben’s aim, so as to show them as
logically unworkable. In all his work one common economy persists wherever he
looks. The past, or temporal common, is
founded on the present or temporal proper, yet the present founds the past
through its attempts to access it as origin. Thus take any large-scale signature-concept
and you reveal the paradox between a past found, even created, by the present
and a present founded on the past, allowing you to suspend or make indifferent
a clear separation between origins and current examples, subsequently freeing
yourself of the discursive control of said signature.

As everything
is, ostensibly, discursive for Agamben, this form of radical criticism reveals
itself to be potentially a powerful political tool for change, not least
because power is one of the most prevalent signatures there is in the West and
also one of the most susceptible to the paradox of the logic of a foundation founded
by that which it is presumed to found.
Render indifferent the opposition between origin (the common foundation
of all) and the present (the proper actualisation of our common foundation)
through philosophical archaeology, and you kill the power of signatures to
sanction and thus control what we think, what we say and yes also what we
do. Fail to render indifferent such
signatures and whatever political action you take will still take place within
the sanctioned confines of discursive intelligibility, especially the essential
political act of the modern age: revolutionary difference.

3. Life

To close let us take perhaps the
most controversial and important signature for Agamben, Life, subject it to
philosophical archaeology, and thus render it inoperative as a mode of
intelligibility for us by making the two parts of the oppositional economy of
the term indifferent to each other.

For
us Life is a term which explains our biological existence. Yet is also explains the specific case of
human life, a privileged form of animal life.
Finally, it also results in moments when the privilege of human life is
removed from a human and they find themselves treated like a mere animal, a
situation Agamben calls bare life. Agamben’s
most widely read work, Homo Sacer,
presents the origins of this situation and its implications for the world
today.

There
is, in fact, not such thing as Life. It
is a discursive construct permitted by structures of power to sanction
different forms of behaviour and which we have been complicit with for
centuries. It is then an intelligible
signature, not a thing as such. How did
this come about? Agamben’s moment of
arising is the first recorded instance of bare life in a Western judiciary
system, the figure of the homo sacer in ancient Roman law. How was the homo sacer sanctioned when its
logic, a citizen inside the law who can be killed and it not be termed murder
thus placing them outside the law, is illogical? Agamben notes that the Greeks did not have a
single word for life but at least two terms pertaining to what we see as
life. Zoe was private and animal
life. Bios was public, particular,
political life. At some point a single
term, Life, was increasingly used to relate to a human life made up of two
parts: the biological and the social. Of
these zoe was the common, the foundational, after all without biological life
what are we? Yet bios, the social
specificity of how we live, is the realm in which human life is differentiated
from animal or indeed slave or female life, for the Greeks and Romans. It is who we are as male Roman citizens that
makes us different from animals. Thus it
is bios which founds zoe by saying zoe is only one local instance of life, the
animal.

At this point
things become confused. Which life comes
first? Biological life or human life as
different from animal life and so protected by and subject to say law? The homo sacer is made possible at precisely this
point. Bare life seems like a return to
zoe or animal life. This man can be
killed like a beast. Yet in order for
bare life to be made bare, the rights of the citizen must be stripped from
them. This clearly shows that animality
is a concept created by the human, and yet bare life is presented as a return
to a state of nature: zoe.

Bare
life then shows the following facts of Life.
Life is a discursive construct.
It depends on the idea that it is a-discursive i.e. that animals exist
before humans. Yet in fact bios,
political life, constructs zoe, animal life, as the origin of all life only to
legitimate itself. It founds its own
foundation. This impossible economy, how
can a foundation be founded after what it has founded, how can the common be a
construct of the proper, is revealed in those moments when the clear
distinction between common and proper in a signature is rendered
indifferent. Homo sacer is the first
recorded instance of this relevant to Life.
A citizen is returned back
into a state of animality only if they are first
a citizen. Bare life is life
denuded. It must be dressed first before
it can be bared.

Philosophical
archaeology takes a contemporary issue, here the question of human life. It traces the origin of the usage of the
controlling term to sanction certain forms of behaviour, here the signature
Life. It reveals that it is always the
case that the signature will be bifurcated into a structure of commonality
which comes first and founds, and one of proper actuality, specific subsequent
cases that come about due to a common foundation. It then finds limit cases, zones of
indistinction, where the clear differentiation within the signature is unclear,
indifferentiated. It then hones in on
these to show that the signature in question is not universal and necessary but
historically constructed. It reveals the
first instance where the signatory economy gets confused, is
indifferentiated. It then humbly
suggests if the logic of the signature Life is illogical, and it can be shown
that the signature Life itself can be traced historically to a specific first
moment, then we don’t need the signature Life.

Due
to indifference we can historically reveal the means by which we can live
without Life. This seems to me the
overall message of Agamben’s work.

Many thanks to the editors of Cult Revista Cult who commissioned this piece, translated it into Portuguese and gave me permission to print it here.